Comment by spitx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spitx | Hacker News Reader

I think Durga's comment on the NYT site puts it best:

  While the above story describes a real problem in SF, it
  ignores two much more significant contributors to the
  issue that interlock with the effects of tech money.

  First, SF residents are extremely anti-development and
  NIMBYism runs rampant. It is ridiculously costly, time
  consuming, and difficult to renovate or build anything in
  SF. Add in a corrupt city planning process that was
  deliberately designed to allow just one person to hold up
  any project, large or small, and the result is a extremely
  restricted supply of both residential and commercial real
  estate.

  Second, the most influential opinion-leaders and elected 
  officials are virulently anti-business. This has led to an
  oppressive level of mandates, fees, permits, taxes,
  licenses, and neighborhood activist oversight to be
  imposed on all businesses, from the local mom-and-pop dry
  cleaner to the few remaining large companies based in SF.

  So, the combination of the influx of highly paid (or
  already affluent) residents, an essentially fixed and
  unchanging real estate stock, and a deeply ingrained
  hatred of private economic activity by both politicians
  and active voters result in places like the Grove being
  penalized for their success. The problem cannot be reduced
  to a simplistic case of rich tech workers throwing down on
  starving artists.

Source:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/san-francisco-hango...

I lived in the Deep South of the U.S. for some time, and witnessed first hand the horror that is a local government run by radicals (in this case, right wing religious nuts).

I'm not an idiot. I recognize Ayn Rand's novel Atlast Shrugged for what it is: fantasian philosophy. However, I read it to understand people influenced by it. One tiny part of then novel kind of explains radicals to me.

Mystics of Spirit: Right Wing Religious nuts who want to force you to suspend reason to placate their moral world-view by modeling all your actions according to their deity, evene if these actions are, in your mind, considered wrong/evil/etc.

Mystics of Muscle: Lefty nuts who want to force you to suspend reason to placate their moral world-view by giving money to others who are quantified by the group as "needing" it the most. "Need" is never straightforward or clear. It is something that, like fashion, shifts over time and often is imagined.

In this case, the "need" is for San Francisco to never change, and for people in houses to never have tall buildings block their view, because........ well, they have no real reason that isn't in some way imposing their unquantifiable need above the very quantifiable problem of too much demand and too little supply.

"This has led to an oppressive level of mandates, fees, permits, taxes, licenses, and neighborhood activist oversight to be imposed on all businesses"

If you follow http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/ you get a pretty good view of some of the regulatory obstacles.

Some particularly good ones:

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/09/28.html

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/10/09.html

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/09/11.html

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/06/13.html

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/06/01.html

Yea well, those silly stupid San Franciscans with their disregard for market forces and the natural unstoppable march of property rights will soon be pushed out of their city and the culture they created will be gone and the capitalist homogenization of another city will be complete. Just like god intended.

What "culture" would that be? A 10-year-old restaurant in the Marina? I lived in SF in 1999 and never heard "The Grove" called "San Francisco's living room".

This is one person's property rights versus another's, not property rights versus something else.

This story isn't about The Grove, it is about the tragedy of gentrification.

Your statement, 'what culture?', taken out of context, describes the situation perfectly.

Why are these newcomers with their hefty salaries moving to the Mission, instead of some suburb closer to their work? Because of the culture. The music, the art, the creative forces that make San Francisco the appealing place that it is. Guess who isn't making enough to afford even $1500/month rent? That same artist who made this neighborhood the place you want to be in.

I am heavily involved with the art and music community in San Francisco and I don't see ANY large influx of young tech workers getting involved with or even supporting local artists. Sure, if some touring indie rock band plays The Fillmore it is filled with Facebook employees, but that's not the sort of grass root support that feeds a living artistic community.

Your job making web sites and iOS apps does not make you an artist or even a remotely credible creative individual, no matter how much smoke your fellow tech friends are blowing up your ass.

This is a story about a restaurant that opened in 1999 in the Marina, isn't it? How much do you want to tell me about gentrification in the Marina in 1999?

Thank you for setting me straight about my job making web pages and iOS applications.

>but that's not the sort of grass root support that feeds a living artistic community.

When you get some artists worthy of grassroots support, trust me, it'll come. Believe it or not, I came to SF 6 years ago to become a writer. It took me less than a year to realize that most of the writers in SF live in denial and are delusional. They believe the writing community here is as great as LA and NY and the only reason they can't get published is because of the evil, corporate publishing companies. This type of attitude is typical for all walks of life in SF, too, which is one of the reasons it will never regain the artistic prominence it had in the 60's. SF has yet to move past its counter-culture roots, despite the fact the rest of the country already has. That makes everything holding on to the old message feel dated and stale. Dated and stale do not make for good art.

>This story isn't about The Grove, it is about the tragedy of gentrification.

Gentrification isn't the real tragedy, here. It's complacency. Manhattan remains THE center of art and culture in America, despite several decades of heavy gentrification and a staggeringly high cost of living that SF has only recently been able to match. What's your excuse, again? They're closing your favorite late night hangout? Find another.

Los Angeles is actually the center of art in America.

Maybe if your art was good someone, anyone, would give a shit about it.

Well, judge for yourself: http://open.spotify.com/artist/6BPUgRHwjjtpLZnVsgPnp4

Reply on news.ycombinator.com